Undisciplinary Learning. Remapping The Aesthetics of Resistance

About

What would an aesthetic education of the present be? Which forms of un_learning does the art of the 21st century propose? How do we live and create knowledge? Where do we find it? Whose knowledge, whose aesthetics, whose present, whose we?

Undisciplinary Learning takes the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss (1916–1982) as an impetus to question current knowledge politics at the intersection of artistic, political, and pedagogical practices. In the book, the political interpretation of art and the collective acquisition of knowledge form the foundation for the development of resistant subjectivities, collectivization, and the mobilization against oppression and exploitation. Self-education as a form of emancipation not only comprises the crux of Weiss’ trilogy, but its densely woven textual surface seems to anticipate other, collective forms of reading and therein acts of listening to and dis-/agreeing with one another.

Adopting an intersectional perspective its historical expansion, on its urban resonances in Berlin and current fields of insurgency, Undisciplinary Learning suggests expanded readings and critical relocations of The Aesthetics of Resistance. In the exhibition, urban interventions, encounters and conversations, education is probed as a mode of political imagination that recognizes heterogeneous forms of knowledge and integrates the body, the city, relationships, and the environment as spaces of un_learning. Undisciplinary Learning maps artistic approaches that enact self-empowering pedagogies – especially from feminist, queer, and decolonializing contexts – to radically question hegemonic cultures of knowledge.

In the two-part exhibition, artistic practices of collective unlearning and anti-authoritarian knowledge transfers form the basis for the transtemporal and transgeographic repositioning of The Aesthetics of Resistance. Designed as a spatial ecology that expresses a heterogeneous community and different forms of knowledge, Undisciplinary Learning: Space accommodates a flexible scenography for emancipatory practices, stories, and socialities. As a programmatic overture in the neighboring spaces of the group exhibition, the performative archive Trümmerberg Kilimanjaro by Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro and Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat (Squat Monument) interweaves the urban traces of colonial cultural and migration contexts of Tempelhof—where District is located—with the voices of protagonists from anticolonial and anti-racist resistance.

The Exhibition takes place at DISTRICT and at other locations in Berlin.

With Luis Berríos-Negrón, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro & Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat (Squat Monument), Julie Carvalho & Roland Lauth & Sebastien Stolarczyk, Exit Deutschland e.V., Alicia Frankovich, Ha Za Vu Zu, Naomi Hennig, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Vladan Jeremić & Rena Raedle & Ina Wudtke, Rajkamal Kahlon, Frida Klingberg, Ins A Kromminga & Jannik Franzen, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Julia Lazarus, Achim Lengerer, Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V., Method Fund, Gabriel Rossell Santillán, RYBN.ORG, Lerato Shadi, Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes – Bund der Antifaschistinnen und Antifaschisten The Association of Persecutees of the Nazi RegimeFederation of Antifascists, Andreas Wutz a.o.